[OCTOBER] Play Anything by Ian Bogost

[Liz England]

This month's reading will be Play Anything by Ian Bogost.

Here's what the publisher has to say about it:

Life is no game. It’s demanding, boring, and rarely fun. But what if we’ve got games wrong? Playing anything—whether an instrument, a sport, or a video game—takes hard work and makes absurd demands. Where’s the fun in that?
In Play Anything, acclaimed philosopher and award-winning game designer Ian Bogost reveals that play isn’t a mindless escape from boring reality. Instead, play is what happens when we accept limitations, narrow our focus, and—consequently—have fun. Which is also how to live a good life. Manipulating cards to make a poker hand is no different than treating chores and obligations as tools but which we can discover new happiness.
Ranging from Internet culture to moral philosophy, from ancient poetics to modern consumerism, Play Anything reveals how today’s chaotic world can only be tamed—and enjoyed—when we first impose boundaries on ourselves.

It's available in hard copy, ebook, and audiobook format. It's a recent release so fingers crossed it's available in all your regions.

I've heard really mixed reviews of the books so far (love it, hate it) so I'm curious to see what you all think of it.

[Ali Moeeny]

I started the book (Play Anything) with the assumption that it is about game design and development or has something to do with it, and it through me off, have done a few chapters so far.

Just wanted to warn people: don't go in with the same assumption, it is a good book though. 

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Ali

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[Giulia Yamasaki]

Sadly, it's not available in ebook format in Brazil.

I could buy the physical edition, but by the time it got here, it would be too late

I'm curious about the book! Wanna read about what you guys think of it anyway.

[Kevin Day]

I finished it before this weekend but wanted to sit on it a bit. Overall I'd say I enjoyed it but like Ali mentioned it is not specifically dealing with design or developing games. Instead I'd say it is more about play, and understanding what that means. I'd equate it to Raph Koster's 'A Theory of Fun for Game Design' where Bogost is trying to figure out what play is much like Raph was trying to define fun. I got a little discouraged at the beginning, especially when he began to discuss his trip to Wal Mart. I didn't understand why he was mentioning this, and felt like I was missing something. It was hard for me to continue because I felt like if I couldn't grasp his meaning about all these items in Wal Mart I wouldn't understand what he was trying to say, but luckily he used a few more examples to explain his ideas. 

The message I came away with after finishing was that we can't sugar coat things we don't like, and that despite adding a 'spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down' it really is just covering up the medicine. Instead we should figure out how to embrace and celebrate the medicine itself. I was conflicted by this, because at first I took him to mean we should take things at face value, and try to figure out how to like those things as is. Like is example of his daughter trying to not step on cracks in tiles, she accepted her fate of being dragged through the mall at a pace she couldn't keep up with. Through this acceptance she created a game to help ease her suffering (if you could call it that haha) and entertain herself despite not being in control. I was struggling because if we take things at face value and just accept them, I figured what is the point of critiquing games? If we never ask things to do something new or different then we will never push forward. If we are content in doing ten pushups and never attempt at doing more, we are forever stuck doing ten pushups. In the end however, I think what he actually means is discovering the limits that exist and accepting that they are there, but it is OK to push for more with the understanding that the current object or scenario cannot provide that.

After mulling on it though, I think the actual message is more along the lines of defining work and play. Work is us saying, 'I can only do this' or 'I have to do this.' Play on the other hand is us asking, 'What can I do with this?' or 'What can this thing do?' In order to play with something we have to push past the boredom, and like Bogost says, bore through it to find what we can play with. If we can push past something to figure out what makes it tick, or at least to the point of asking what can something do, we can in turn play with it. By finding the boundaries of something, and working within them instead of fighting them they become more enjoyable and we will have a deeper understanding of them. 

That being said I still kind of feel I don't fully get this book so I'd love to hear what others have to say when they are done, but I'd say it was an enjoyable read. Not sure if I would say it is a must read for designers, but definitely one they should check out at some point or another.

[Liz England]

‫ I'm a terrible book club leader these days since I'm always late with my readings...

I just finished Play Anything. Not sure what took so long with this one. My first reactions were pretty negative - I didn't particularly like the first half of the book, but I really enjoyed the second half. I'm still trying to figure out what it is that I disliked so much.

There's some things style-wise that turned me off - like, the author is very cynical but writing about an extremely optimistic philosophy. He makes a lot of smaller claims, many of them I disagree with, while trying to illustrate or prove his greater argument, which I totally agree with. I think that combo made this a frustrating read because bringing up my disagreements felt like nitpicking details. The main philosophical gist of the book, though, I am totally behind. 

My favorite thing is his redefinition of fun as an activity, not a synonym for "joy". Another concept I think is extremely valuable: the idea of background/foreground figures, that bringing things from the background into the foreground is how you can anything into play. His whole chapter on how play is about limits is something I think I'd already taken for granted.

For things I disagreed with, I think most of mine involve his concept of "ironoia". I get where he's coming from, but some of his examples - like turning Phil Fish's tweet against Minecraft into a Minecraft creation - are definitely within the confines of play from my point of view. Remix culture is all about taking something and reinventing it (taking it from the background and into the foreground again).

I think I need to read a bit more from people he seems to be arguing with - those that define play as subversive or working outside of limits, as opposed to working within well-defined constraints. If anyone has a suggestion for book that has an alternative (opposite?) approach to play, I am all ears. This book left me feeling like I am missing half of the conversation.

(Like Kevin I probably wouldn't recommend this book to practicing designers/devs. I feel like there's other books on the nature of play that should be prerequisites before approaching this one).

[Nick Lalone]

I always enjoy seeing people react to the way Bogost writes. 

I wrote this review a while back for a pub but I thought i'd put it here. Take it as you will. 

Throughout my time in Grad School, I have been intensely curious about the word “play” and increasingly disenchanted by the idea of game studies. If play and culture are inexorably intertwined then it seems to me that studying games does little whereas studying play in things that are not games can give unique insight into culture itself. However, in order to really get at this concept one would have to engage the work of Johan Huizinga in a way that is often overlooked, discarded, avoided, or reduced to absurdity - the magic circle. When I found out that Ian Bogost was writing a book specifically about this concept, I was excited to see what he had to say on the subject. To that end, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, & The Secret of Games may be one of the important books on the study of play I have found. Unfortunately, the book will most likely remain largely ignored.

 

The book will remain ignored because it is nearly impossible to pin down what the book exactly is. Is it a self-help book? Is it a book about design? Is it a humanities monograph? The likelihood of each of these things is very high but no one category stands out. As evidence, while I read Play Anything, I would read various passages to my wife. Each time, she would nod in agreement but ask, “What is that book even about?” Well, I could not really tell you. The book is about everything, yet nothing at all and this is why I decided to write a review of it - the act of reviewing will pin down the meaning the book creates for me but for you, the book may mean something else entirely. That itself is a rarity among books about play since the last 16 years of game studies have been dominated by establishing games as a unique object worthy of inquiry in and of itself.

 

So in one sentence, what is Play Anything even about? Well, that is simple: the idea that play creates culture. The tricky part of this topic is that Bogost uses a definition of play that sits at the foundation of all definitions of play: “Play is a way of operating a constrained system in a gratifying way.” Purposeless, its own sense of time, its own sense of order, and inside of a space delineated for play itself is what we typically refer to as the definition of play. Through Bogost’s definition though, we see play take back much of what it has lost from the forgotten aspects of Huizinga’s work. Play is everything - from Astyanax to Yard Work; from errands to Twilight Imperium; from Tetris to parenting. Gratification comes from operating the system in a way that provides us gratification - not fun. In fact, the book purports, we do not really know what fun is.

 

The problem with fun is that we all think we know what it is yet in truth it has no definable, no operational meaning. Unlike Play whose meaning has shifted throughout cultural and linguistic change, fun only very recently appeared as a term. However, fun has seemingly gained more power than the concept of play itself. Indeed, if you look at reviews of games, fandom conversations comparing games, or even listening to people at an arcade talk about different machines, you will often hear about one game as being more fun than another is. Yet fun, Bogost says, “is not so much a feeling but exhaust produced when an operator can treat something with dignity.” Dignity is an interesting word in this quote. One could also use the term “Authentic” and get in to Heidegger’s Das Man. However, the term “exhaust” is more important as this quote is not so much about play but about how we have come to treat play only in terms of its outcome, “Was this fun?”

 

This harkens back to Bogost’s definition of play - operating a system in a gratifying way. Only, this is a general description. If we were to unpack this a little, we would call into mind the philosophies of Heidegger and of McLuhan or ready-at-hand / present-at-hand and figure/ground. These two philosophical constructs help us understand what occurs when we play - we take something that is ready-at-hand (potential of a thing), something in the ground, and we reframe it as present-at-hand while taking that presence a step further by redeploying that object in new ways. For Huizinga, this was the creation of the magic circle. This is the bounding of space whereupon play begins. Bogost takes this magic circle a step further by considering the act that takes part inside of that circle. He then corrects the problems with the term (namely, the term itself) by referring to the creation of a bounded space as a playground.

 

My favorite example of playground creation is a story about the author’s daughter. One day, the author was at the mall. The mall was (at least since the 80s) not particularly welcoming and the author was in a hurry. As such, he was in a particularly foul mood while dragging his daughter by the hand through the mall at a speed her little legs could handle. She began to skip and as she did, began to tug on her father’s hand. He looks back to find out why and sees that she had begun to skip and avoid cracks on the ground. She had turned the misery Bogost was feeling into a playground. To use the terms in the previous paragraph, his daughter has taken the ready-at-hand status of the mall flooring and turned it present-at-hand or into a playground wherein she began to explore that presence. This exploration consisted of limiting herself further. In doing so, she escaped the reality of the situation by accepting it totally.

 

We accept very little about our lives when it comes to the systems and limits that surround us. In fact, Bogost tells us that we have come to do everything we can to distance or reject those “mundane” aspects of our lives. As such, we have become so enamored with irony - saying one thing but meaning another - that irony is now the currency of our age. Our lives are as such now that the necessary tasks of any day are seen as a nuisance. In fact, we are surrounded by so many limitations, so much nuisance, that we can no longer see the wonder of what those limits represent. We disdain these omnipresent rules, limits, and common ordinary events that they have become, as water is to a fish - necessary for life yet invisible due to its necessity for everyday life.

 

Bogost suggests that ironia, or a mistrust of things as paranoia is a mistrust of people, is the consequence of too much irony. It keeps things, objects, outside of any presence or readiness. Irony interrupts the creation of playgrounds, interrupts the creation of magic circles, and interrupts the very essence of play given the lack of engagement. If we all currently suffer from ironia then it is not possible to create playgrounds – not authentic or playgrounds with dignity. The way this inability to create playgrounds manifests is through a pursuit of fun that is dominated by a mistrust of things.

 

This is best illustrated by a model of the formation of irony:

 

(Potential): Anything has potential…

(Pursuit of fun): …that potential must be fun…

(Ironia): …yet all fun is insufficient

 

The moral of this book is simple though extremely difficult to understand: given the existence of such pervasive irony, play is not doing what we want but doing what we can with what is given. As a book about play, I think this book gets at how play manifests culture. The most useful aspect of this book; however, is that it also discusses how the concept of play retreats through mistrust, through a seeking to escape reality, through fun seeking or joy seeking behaviors.

 

Ultimately, this exploration of playground formation is what I believe launches this book into the foreground of a very important issue - we have trouble in game studies not because games themselves are immature or not useful but because the very act of designing these games is essentially applied ironia. It calls to mind the debate between effect and meaning that Henry Jenkins described. It also calls to mind the criticism from Roger Ebert about the possibly artistic nature of games. Can games at current be art if they are designed as a means of escape and not a reflection of ourselves?

 

If you are engaged in the study or manufacture of games in any sense, you owe it to yourself to read this book. You may not agree with it. You might not have the same reaction I had to it. You might not accept what it has to say but that should not be where your time with this book stops. Any reader should take a step further and ask, “Why do I think this way? Why did I react this way? Are my designs ironic? Is that disruptive?” The next step would be to begin to reconnect your daily life to the games you play, the games you design, the games you critique, and the way you feel about the people who play them.

Nick LaLone
Penn State University

Information Science and Technology
ist.psu.edu

www.nicklalone.com

www.beforegamedesign.com

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